The cleaning and disinfecting of hard surfaces is important in both residential and commercial settings. The increasing importance of hygiene combined with the fast moving pace of the modern world has created a need for antibacterial products with fast cleaning and disinfecting action. The main concerns are to effectively reduce bacteria and maintain a consumer acceptable aesthetics profile while producing an acceptable human and environmentally safe composition. As will be appreciated, this implicitly puts constraints on the amount and type of chemicals that can be used to formulate a commercially acceptable composition.
As such, there remains a need for a cleaning and disinfecting product with a much more efficient antibacterial system that also maintains a consumer acceptable aesthetics profile while producing an acceptable human and environmentally safe composition.
It has surprisingly been found that formulating liquid cleaning and disinfecting compositions with an alkyl or substituted alkyl branched alkyl amine oxide significantly improves antibacterial killing efficiency as compared to when a linear alkyl amine oxide surfactant is formulated in the composition. Without wishing to be bound by theory it is believed that the presence of alkyl or substituted alkyl branches on the amine oxide main alkyl chain makes it more difficult for the amine oxide to be packed into surfactant micelles and, as such, making them more available to migrate as surfactant monomers to the bacterial cell membrane, boosting antibacterial efficacy accordingly.